This week in ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865 we’re reading some short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is, in most moments, my favorite author–certainly my favorite author on the nineteenth century. I won’t get into comparisons here–between Hawthorne and Poe or Irving or Melville or Twain, etc. I find Hawthorne’s quiet (mostly) obsession with history (Puritan history in particular) and his subtly haunted mind resonates with me more than Poe’s terror, Melville’s virtuosity and bombast, or Twain’s picaresque humor. Poe ties me to a chair, my eyes held open by toothpicks, and blathers inescapable madness in my ear (almost exclusively in first-person voice), Hawthorne generally stands aloof from the story with me, calmly pointing out the story–its characters and actions.

In “The Custom-House” sketch that opens Hawthorne’s most famous work, his short novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), you’ll find the bit that I really want to present here. It’s a passage of a couple of longish paragraphs about the imagination and writing haunting stories. These ideas came to mind recently when I was sitting around a fire with friends and the moon was out.

Hawthorne writes about the blend of ethereal, spiritual light of the moon and the physical, visceral light of the fire.

Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the bookcase; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

The above contrasting and blending of moonlight and firelight works not only in the realm of the imagination but also in our understanding of ourselves. “We are spirits in the material world,” as the Police song goes. We might think of the moonlight–in the text and in the photograph–as our souls or, if you don’t believe in the eternal soul, our ineffable selves and the fire as our humanness, our flesh and blood.

In Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” he captures the same idea succinctly in Faith Brown’s pink ribbons. In this image, the soul is, perhaps, white and associated with purity, heaven (and angels), cleanliness, peacefulness. The red portion of the pink ribbons can have positive and negative connotations: flesh and blood, passion (good and bad); the red of blood can be violence or it can be healthy and redemptive. So, Faith’s pink ribbons reveal her to be all of these things, which is what humans are.

I can picture Nathaniel Hawthorne sitting in that empty chair to the left of these photos, staring alternately into the fire and then into the moonlit distance, and thinking such thoughts. . . .

In 1845, American writer Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) published a piece titled “Fourth of July” in the New York Daily Tribune. Fuller follows–probably not consciously–the trajectory of Thomas Jefferson’s thinking when he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. . . . [T]he people . . . will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money. . . .” Fuller writes:

Those who have obtained their selfish objects will not take especial pleasure in thinking of them to-day, while to unbiased minds must come sad thoughts of National Honor soiled in the eyes of other nations, of a great inheritance, risked, if not forfeited.

While Fuller admires the values with which the United States of America began in the late 18th century, she recognizes that the presence of slavery in the land, the nation’s genocidal acts of Indian removal, the looming Mexican-American War, and other situations betray and mock those values.

. . . the noble sentiment which she [the U.S.A.] expressed in her early youth is tarnished; she has shown that righteousness is not her chief desire, and her name is no longer a watchword for the highest hopes to the rest of the world. She knows this, but takes it very easily; she feels that she is growing richer and more powerful, and that seems to suffice her.

What Fuller recognizes is that many–even most–who cry “Freedom” are really not interested in freedom as a right for all. Instead, their definition of freedom is selfish. They want freedom to do what benefits them, what makes them feel good, what feeds their arrogance. They cry “Freedom,” but what they really want–without thought of consequences even to themselves–is to win elections and beat the other side. Once that’s done, it’s enough. They have no policy platform to try and move forward.

Fuller again.

For what is Independence if it do not lead to Freedom?–Freedom from fraud and meanness, from selfishness, from public opinion so far as it does not consent with the still small voice of one’s better self?

I don’t think many of us remain able to hear that “still small voice.” Our lives are too noisy with what passes for news, too cluttered with our pointless, meandering desires. Our brains are muddled. We have become mean, and we revel in our meanness. We’re bullies. We’re following Xians–that is, Christians without Christ–to the altar of our Baal.

It used to be–in the Civil War, in the Great Depression, in the Civil Rights Movement–that factions within the U.S. could bicker and fight without threatening the nation itself. The idea of the United States of America was transcendent, stretched above our mean pettiness and selfishness. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. The idea of the U.S.A.–“who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t,” as Springsteen sings in “Long Walk Home”–seems no longer transcendent, no longer cohesive enough to remain untouchable above the fray.

Even if our better selves prevail today (and I understand that many will have a different understanding of what that might mean), I don’t think it will matter in the long run. We have, I’m afraid, grown too ignorant and lazy to recover. The devaluing of our minds and of education in general is too far gone to be turned around–mostly because we’re now too lazy-minded to do so.

Yesterday, I posted a poem and a few comments about my dad on the 26th anniversary of his walking on from this life. A cousin responded with thanks for Dad’s service. I appreciate that. I really do. But I question whether Dad would even recognize this country–that eats up its poor, that elevates its celebrities to gods, that begrudges and generally rejects every request for fair treatment from the denigrated and powerless–as the country he served.

The Idiocracy looms ahead. I give us twenty-five years. Fifty tops.

A poem for my dad, who walked on from this life to what’s next twenty-six years ago today.

The Veteran’s Cemetery, Early November

Early November, when his autumn work was done,
he left us standing stupid and staring
at the blue-brown of the coming
Appalachian winter.

He left behind the shrinking garden, harvested,
the expanding lawn, mowed its final time.
He left behind the handy man
who could fix anything,

took leave of the newly retired postal worker
who never went postal, and abandoned
his role as little patriarch,
begetter of two sons.

He abdicated head-of-household status, in
the house that was never his, left the loved
wife of forty-two years and her
overbearing weakness—

That night he shed this life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes
and would have been surprised by all who braved
early snows to watch him lie down
in a proud soldier’s grave.

I still think of him often, almost daily. He was a quiet and principled man, and I have tried to emulate him in as many ways as possible. Although I’m sure I caused him to shake his head and wonder, Who is this kid?, he was steadfastly there with what I now understand was his expression of love and support.

I have often wanted him back here, to ask his advice on this or that, to see his expression of joy at watching my sons grow, to sit quietly on the porch with him as evening comes on. But even if he had been able to live the longer life he might have had, he would probably be gone anyway by now. And in most ways these days, I’m glad that he’s where he is, far beyond the reach of the ignorant and arrogant and belligerent madness that has taken over and erased the ideological stance to which he adhered in his lifetime, glad that he’s far beyond the horrific sight of the country he served with such pride on the verge of going down in flames.

[Updated with video]

On September 16, 2022, a beautiful late-summer night on the cusp of autumn in east Tennessee, I played and sang for friends—new and old—and family on the Barnett Patio, perhaps my favorite music venue ever. I named the show “Chronology II,” and the setlist consisted of songs I’d written from 1989 to the present. (“Chronology I” took place in late May 2022 and included songs from 1975 to 1989.)

“So Much Depends” turned out to be a favorite song that September evening, which both surprised and pleased me. It’s a recent song, probably written in 2017, and only Leesa and a handful of others had ever heard it. The writing of the song began with a musical challenge, which I ultimately failed, and ended up with a lyric challenge to our better angels and our best selves, which we can’t afford to fail.

Let me first get this out of the way. Many who know our twentieth-century American poetry are familiar with William Carlos Williams and his imagistic, no-ideas-but-in-things poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” and its well-known first line “so much depends.”

“The Red Wheelbarrow”

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams

I’m pleased to have the connection made between my songs and Williams’s famous poem. But I have to confess that I didn’t make the connection at first. My opening and repeated use of the phrase—maybe similar to the poet’s use of it—speaks to my urgent sense of how important it is that we be our best human selves in this moment in the history of our world.

The musical challenge was to try and write an interesting and listenable song using just two chords. Not to imply that this hasn’t been done before. It has—and brilliantly. Here’s just a sample of my favorites: “Born in the U.S.A.” (Springsteen); “Eleanor Rigby” & “Paperback Writer” (Beatles); “Horse with No Name” (America); “Dreams” (Fleetwood Mac); “Copperhead Road” (Steve Earle). Many more great and not-so-great two-chord songs are out there. No, the thing was that yours truly had never written such a thing. And I still haven’t. I could probably play “So Much Depends” with a two-chord setting, but for now it has a couple of others thrown in.

To the lyric. Through this first verse—and throughout the song—understand “so much depends” as pointing to how vitally important, I believe, are the things that follow the phrase.

So much depends upon where you’re from and who raised you up—
If you can live up to your raising or if you can rise above it.
So much depends upon whom you believe in and who believes in you.
So much depends upon whom you love and maybe more on who loves you.

(By the way, I’ve wrestled with who/whom usage in this song. For now, I write “whom” and I sing “who.”)

Some of us have been “raised” by good people in good places and good situations. But all variations of this statement are possible: raised by bad people in good places and situations; raised by good people in bad places and situations; raised by bad people in good places and bad situations. These range across a spectrum—maybe more than one spectrum—and are not distinct and static categories. I could write page after page teasing out subtleties.

What becomes important to us is that we can either live up to good raising, being true to the varied gifts we’ve been given, or rise above bad raising rather than fall—or play—victim to the bad. How well we’re able to do one or the other depends a great deal on what we believe about ourselves and the visible and invisible worlds around us. And as the last line says, the love we share and receive—deserved or undeserved—is likely to be the tide that raises us and the ties that bind us.

Here’s the second verse:

So much depends upon your education and how you value your own mind.
So much depends upon your need for attention—
whom you want to impress and why.
So much depends upon believing in yourself and standing in your truth.
So much depends upon not being afraid and not being a fool.

At so many levels, many of them at the most important levels of our learning to be human, we have devalued education—or maybe simply lost the understanding of its value. We have likewise lost a sense of the value of our own minds. The hopeful idea is that maybe our minds aren’t lost to us but are instead just distracted from themselves and their incredible value. This distraction takes many forms, and to be honest, it might begin with the failures of our education, especially that of the younger folks who have come up through a school system more interested in test scores and measurable outcomes than in educating students. Education is not a business. Education is not a competition. Education is not a tool for pseudo-conservative hacks to train mindless voters and mindless believers in American exceptionalism. Other distractions include, but are not limited to, 24-hours news, reality TV (one of the stupidest things on the planet, which has lifted some of the stupidest and underserving people to the heights of political and cultural power), fashion, the need to be in constant movement (like sharks), a desire for violence and blood (real and metaphorical), the doomed-to-fail sense that life is a perpetual party.

Did you ever know a person who—consciously or unconsciously—devalues herself (or himself) for somebody’s attention? This leads to nowhere good. (See the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates.) And it leads there fast. I’m sure we are all familiar with examples of this. Many is the good person who has been dragged downward for the desire of another (or to be desired by another), while the reality is that the better outcome would be that the object of their desire should be raised up rather than bent towards.

The last two lines of the second stanza suggest the remedies to our negative inclinations lurking behind the stanza’s first two lines. So, we must believe in ourselves rather than the opposite. We must recognize and commit to our individual truths rather than the opposite. We must not be afraid to be ourselves. We must not play the fool for anybody.

So much depends upon the monsters in you and the mayhem that they make.
So much depends upon the heroes in you and the stands they choose to take.
So much depends upon how well you’re able to live in your own skin
And on if you can hold on, let go, rise up again and again.

We all have interior monsters that we try to hide from ourselves and more strenuously try to hide from our world. Monsters are scary and dangerous, and so this makes sense. The destructive poles of this truth are, at one end, those who unleash their monsters and revel in the chaos of their mayhem and, at the opposite end, those who believe they have no monsters, which allows the monsters that are indeed there to have the run of the place. The behaviors at each end of the spectrum not only wreak the same destruction but also, ultimately, wreak this destruction in the same way.

All around us—as individuals, as a culture, as a church, as a nation, as a world of humans—we are in the process of a hard fail. I fear that this will be the ultimate and final failing. We must find our best selves and learn to live with these in the best ways we can. We have so much worth holding on to and so much we need to let go. Sometimes it’s hard to hold on, and sometimes it seems impossible to let go. But through the character of our better angels, we can survive the tug of war that is holding on and letting go, finding the strength—which is more often than not the courage found in faith and conviction and our common humanity—to “rise up again and again.”

On you, so much depends!

So Much Depends

So much depends upon where you’re from and who raised you up—
If you can live up to your raising or if you can rise above it.
So much depends upon whom you believe in and who believes in you.
So much depends upon whom you love and maybe more on who loves you.

So much depends upon your education and how you value your own mind.
So much depends upon your need for attention—
whom you want to impress and why.
So much depends upon believing in yourself and standing in your truth.
So much depends upon not being afraid and not being a fool.

So much depends upon the monsters in you and the mayhem that they make.
So much depends upon the heroes in you and the stands they choose to take.
So much depends upon how well you’re able to live in your own skin
And on if you can hold on, let go, rise up again and again.

On you, so much depends!

Here’s a word: Survivance. Here’s my understanding of its meaning in the context of indigenous people: the very act of their survival into the 21st century is in itself a multi-layered and perpetual act of resistance—to colonization, to genocide, to assimilation and erasure, to one-sided history, to stereotyping, to demoralization, to broken treaties (thousands of them). . . .

Very little of the story mainstream education teaches about Christopher Columbus is true. And even the bits that are true, such as October and 1492, are sanitized for American exceptionalism. Yes, he arrived when he said he did, but he had no idea where he was (we have Indians because he thought he was in India or some such place in southern or southeast Asia). Yes, he found beautiful lands inhabited by non-European, non-Catholic people, but he wrote, “. . . of them all I have taken possession” (the beginnings of invasion and colonization).

A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2022

Just a little over two weeks ago, Leesa and I celebrated our 33^rd wedding anniversary (2 September 1989). We were married in the old Methodist church (pictured on the cover of A Twilight Reel) in Walnut, NC. My reverend uncle Joe “Mack” Reeves married us. The wedding party consisted of Leesa, son Lane, and me. My friend Phil Madeira played piano, and my uncle Cloice Plemmons was fond of remembering that “those old church walls had never heard the piano played like that.” Leesa walked down the aisle to Phil’s rendition of “Someone to Watch Over Me.” When she reached the front, I sang our wedding song—“Soulmates.” The song was less than twelve hours old when we married at eleven o’clock that Saturday morning.

I’m not sure how much of the song I had written before I sat down to finish it late on Friday night the 1^st, after the fun and beautiful rehearsal event—can’t remember if we actually rehearsed anything or not—my folks hosted at the end of the long yard at the old homeplace in Walnut. Many aunts and uncles and cousins were there, along with many friends from Asheville and Nashville and elsewhere. They returned the next morning for the eleven o’clock wedding and then joined us for the reception under the beautiful blue skies and still-green trees above Glory Ridge.

Here’s a somewhat embarrassing but apropos story that is characteristic of our soulmateness. After the reception, we went to Asheville, to our hotel, where we hung out with our friends—mostly the ones who’d come from Nashville. At some point, Leesa and I went for supper to China Palace over by the Asheville Mall, where our friend Patrick was the manager. We took our leftovers back to the hotel and put them in our suite’s fridge. Next day, we were heading out for a long drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway. We first said goodbye to our friends, then loaded our car for the driving honeymoon, and put the Chinese leftovers in a trashcan beside the hotel’s little picnic area in the back. Before getting on the Parkway, we drove around in an attempt at finding some lunch, but we couldn’t decide on anything. Finally, Leesa said, “I’d really like to have my leftovers from last night.” I agreed, and we drove back to our hotel and looked in the trashcan. The food had been out of the fridge only thirty minutes or so, and the day wasn’t hot. And nobody had thrown any trash in on top of the Styrofoam containers, so, we them fished out of that trashcan and ate like hungry black bears down from the mountains and raiding the garbage. We leaned back and laughed and enjoyed ourselves!

Soulmates

We have wandered across the years and miles
In search of a clear direction,
While some tangled memories
Held a mysterious connection
To a corner of our hearts—
Whether together or apart—
Where love had waited patiently
From the first day of our history.

Soulmates—
Sold out to fate.
What happens from now on
Was planned before the dawn of time.
Soulmates—
So worth the wait—
Each the other’s gift from heaven
Like hand to glove or rhythm to a rhyme.

Every true heart has the dream of flying
Without the fear of falling.
We stand on this ledge in answer
To love’s higher calling.
Gold to blue to gray
To black with night and rain—
It’s always the same big sky,
And every inch is ours to fly.

Soulmates—
Sold out to fate.
What happens from now on
Was planned before the dawn of time.
Soulmates—
So worth the wait—
Each the other’s gift from heaven
Like hand to glove or rhythm to a rhyme.

When real life seems
To steal the dream,
Don’t let it break your heart,
’Though these bodies tight to this Earth cling.
We can still lean back in laughter.
We can still take to the sky,
’Cause these hearts have earned their wings.

Have you ever thought that the devaluing of education is a reflection of the devaluation of the individual — of you and me — and the society in which live?

If it’s even possible anymore, set aside your political hate for the other side, and think about the education of children and adults (young and old). I challenge you to watch this without the rages of indignation, without taking umbrage (see below), no matter from which side your indignation comes.

I have lots to write about this, but it’s morning at ETSU and I have classes to prepare for.

Here’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day for today, 1 September 2022: umbrage

For some years now, we have excelled at umbrage, at taking umbrage. If our education continues to be devalued, we will never recover from this negative mode of interacting with the world around us.

So, I’ve set up a monthly blogging schedule that I’m trying to adhere to as a minimum of activity here at Words & Music by. . . . It goes like this:

• Every 1st Wednesday is writing about writing – book reviews and such
• Every 2nd Monday is a miscellany – whatever I feel like writing or thinking about
• Every 3rd Saturday is for song stories
• Every 4th Tuesday is my political musings

Today is the 4th Tuesday, so I’m thinking about this world. . . .

I’ve lived in the United States of America for nearly sixty-four years now, and I’ve been reading and teaching American writing and thinking — particularly from its beginnings through the end of the 19th century — for more than twenty-five of those years.

My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester for, again, more than twenty-five years, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay.

Decay in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:

• to decline in health, strength, or vigor
• to fall into ruin
• to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
• rot
• gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
• destruction, death [Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back]

At one point in the first letter of discovery that Columbus sent back to the rulers on Spain in February of 1493, he writes, “Española is a marvel.” “Española” is the island that these days holds the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Then, just over ten years later, again writing to Spain, Columbus writes,

Of Española, Paria, and the other lands, I never think without weeping. I believed that their example would have been to the profit of others; on the contrary, they are in an exhausted state; although they are not dead, the infirmity is incurable or very extensive. . . . in destruction, everyone is an adept.

Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella Regarding the Fourth Voyage

Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the central Founding Fathers and whose face is one of those that desecrate sacred Lakota land in the Black Hills of South Dakota, recognized the experience of decay–and recognized it very early on. In 1780-81, in the midst of our fight for independence from England, Jefferson wrote,

From the conclusion of this war [the American Revolution] we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

Query XVII [on religion] from NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA [composed 1780-81; published 1787]

The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to fend off the inevitable decay.

As Emily Dickinson wrote,

I reason we could die–
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?

Second stanza of her poem 403

On Thursday evening, Leesa and I attended a local literary event. Atlas Books hosts poets and writers once a month at Johnson City’s Dos Gatos, and this month Davis Shoulders of Atlas welcomed poets Thomas Alan Holmes and Susan O’Dell Underwood to the Dos Gatos stage. Alan read from his first collection of poetry, In the Backhoe’s Shadow, published by Iris Press, and Susan — generally known as a poet — read from her first novel, Genesis Road, published by Madville Publishing. And there’s the tie-in to my song, “Genesis Road.”

As is often the case in these modern days, I’d never met Susan in person until Thursday, although we’d been online “friends” for a couple of years. Several months before her novel’s publication, she learned that I had a song with the same title as her upcoming novel. I don’t remember at this point whether Alan told her about it or I did, but Susan and I were joking in a message thread that she should use it as her intro song when she went out for readings to promote her book. While that didn’t happen for her entire book tour, we made it so on Thursday. Alan read from his beautiful and humorous collection to kick things off, and then he and I played “Genesis Road” to welcome Susan to the stage for her reading.

Song and novel are different in content, but Susan and I got our titles from the same place. If you drive I-40 between Knoxville and Nashville (or vice versa), as you enter (or leave) the vicinity of Crossville, TN, you pass Exit 320 for State Highway 298 / Genesis Rd / Crossville. I don’t know how often Susan has seen that sign in her travels, but I saw it lots in the years when I lived in Nashville and traveled many times between there and my home in Walnut, NC. I’m sure that one of the first sightings of the sign I must have flipped open my notebook and written down the road name.

But I was nearing the end of my time in Nashville before I wrote the song. I began with the title and then scoured my notebook for bits and pieces I might use in writing the lyric. The only bit I remember from this part of the process is coming across these lines that became the beginning of the second verse:

But it’s the same sky here,
Painted blue and white,
Sequenced traffic lights
Sequenced day to night.

I remember writing this in Lexington, KY, where I and my friends Noel and T. Michael had gone to pick up scalper tickets for one of Bruce Springsteen’s ’80s tours–either for Born in the U.S.A. or Tunnel of Love. I remember sitting in the car parked facing the street outside some store or other that Noel and T. Michael had gone in to look for one thing or another. The afternoon sky was blue and dotted with cotton-ball clouds. A Lexington street stretched out in front of me, a line of traffic lights changing from green to yellow to red. And then came the lines. Pretty simple, really.

The main happening that brought my Nashville years to a close was reuniting with Leesa after many years apart. At some point as we moved through reunion toward marriage, I knew that I would leave Nashville and return to the North Carolina mountains, specifically to Asheville, where Leesa lived with her son Lane and worked at a major salon. Again, the idea of such a return wasn’t solely related to our physical reunion. I’d been thinking about it. Even though the writing of “There Was Always a Train” preceded that reunion by two or three years, you can still hear her living in the lyric. And before that, I’d reversed our situations in the lyric of “Dizzy from the Distance.” Then, of course, there’s “Best I’ve Ever Seen” and “Homecoming.”

Musically, “Genesis Road” has a simple four-chord structure: C, F, Am, & G. It begins with a little musical hook in the C to F progression, in which the movement on the D-string is this note pattern: E > D > E > F. The song was one put together by the Cody band in those Nashville days (Mark Chesshir and Gene Ford on guitars, Steve Grossman on drums, and either Danny O’Lannerghty or Mark Burchfield on bass; probably Mark C. and Steve on background vocals). Gene Ford came up with the signature lick sings out over the C > F movement. Mark Chesshir took the lead on the breakdown after the first chorus, and Gene took over the lead from there to the third verse.

Genesis Road

We ran the Genesis Road.
We ran it hard and fast,
Living every day like the last,
No questions asked.
With the love of the open-hearted,
A love that knew no shame,
We staked our claim
And Eden it was named.
But something came creeping
Into the garden,
Whispering to my soul,
Telling me there was a bigger world
Than that woman and that lonely road.

But it’s the same sky here,
Painted blue and white,
Sequenced traffic lights
Sequenced day to night.
I see a lonesome star.
I see a tear-stained moon.
And far away somewhere
Those two also shine on you.
Baby, leave your window
And find a picture
Of the days when things were clear.
The smiling face beside you there
Is somber distanced from you here.

In the beginning,
We had it all —
Same sad story
That’s always been told.
Rose of Eden,
I hear you call,
Calling me back
Down the Genesis Road.

There are deeper rhythms in life
Than these driving my reckless pace,
And this mechanical human race
Is losing touch with grace.
You are a dancer in love
With the native rhythms I have left —
The rise and fall of your breast —
The beat of life itself.
Baby, set that rhythm as a beacon
I can feel and follow home.
I’ve left my winding way unmarked,
And there’s no returning on my own.

In the beginning,
We had it all —
Same sad story
That’s always been told.
Rose of Eden,
I hear you call,
Calling me back
Down the Genesis Road.